Milan put on a special training session for young Australian footballers in Perth, with Rúben Amorim and a group of first-team players joining club legends Serginho and Christian Panucci to greet the kids.
The tour is more than a goodwill exercise. Milan run one of Serie A's more commercially minded operations, and a second straight summer in Western Australia is about building a fanbase in a market the club sees as worth the long-haul flights. Grassroots sessions like this are how a European club plants roots in a football culture where it competes with rugby, cricket and the A-League for attention.
Training took place at the Sam Kerr Football Centre, and afterwards Amorim brought Christian Comotto, Fikayo Tomori, Youssouf Fofana and Yunus Musah over to surprise the group. Serginho and Panucci, both travelling with the squad as club ambassadors, ran the session with the children, who watched part of the first-team work and stayed for autographs and photos.
The football itself is close now. Milan face Inter in Perth on August 5, their headline friendly of the tour. The planned closed-doors warm-up against Perth Glory on August 1 was scrapped after Amorim called it off.
A Milan-Inter Derby played 14,000 kilometres from the San Siro is a strange sight, but that is the point. The club is selling itself to a new audience, and a training session with a few local kids is the part of the trip that outlasts the scoreline.